NASA Artemis 1 Mission: Why is Lego, Snoopy Joining This Historical Mission?

For NASA's Artemis mission, four Lego Minifigures and a snoopy will go around the moon and beyond.

The Artemis I mission will orbit the moon before returning to Earth in February. The mission will check that all systems are operational in preparation for future crewed missions.

The Artemis 1 mission will take a crew of human avatars, including a "Moonikin" and vest-wearing "dummies," on tour around the moon to test the agency's new Space Launch System megarocket and Orion ship.

NASA Artemis 1 Mission: Lego Joins The Mission

According to Space.com, NASA's Artemis 1 mission will include Kate and Kyle's characters from Lego Education's SPIKE Prime system as small crewmembers. They'll also be joined by Julia and Sebastian from the Lego City toy range.

The Minifigures also star in the educational "Build to Launch: A STEAM Exploration Series," which is now accessible for parents, educators, and students on the Lego Education website. The series includes ten weeks of digital information about space and related themes in science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics.

The Minifigures, like every astronaut, come with a set of six ground controllers who will assist the spaceflyers. Each Minifigure will host episodes starring their NASA counterpart and interact with students and instructors who ask questions and share their learning experiences on social media using the hashtag #BuildtoLaunch.

Lego has long produced projects and mini figurines based on real-life NASA missions, including many generations of space shuttles and Mars rovers for children, as well as a growing collection of adult-style Lego structures including iconic hardware such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the Discovery space shuttle, the Saturn V that carried Apollo 11 to the moon, and the Apollo 11 Eagle lander.

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On the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission in 2019, NASA published a brief handbook detailing different Lego-NASA cooperation dating back to the 1990s.

Snoopy to Play Important Role

According to Newsweek, Snoopy will play a vital role in the uncrewed Artemis I mission. As a result, this beloved cartoon figure will board a NASA trip with the Lego characters.

On missions, stuffed animals are used to signify that the spaceship has entered zero gravity. When the toys begin to float, they recognize this. According to The Associated Press (via PBS.org), the toys won't destroy anything or mistakenly push buttons because the products are soft and light,

For Friday, the second season of "Snoopy in Space," the Emmy-nominated animated series on Apple TV+, was released, coinciding with the announcement of the next missions. In the first season, Snoopy became an astronaut.

As the plush Snoopy's gravity-monitoring role is formally known, a zero-gravity indicator will not be the first stuffed toy used by astronauts. When Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, embarked aboard Vostok 1, he brought a little toy.

Since then, an owl doll and an Angry Birds toy have been on the International Space Station, a plush R2-D2 served as a talisman on a Soyuz trip in 2015, and a stuffed snowman Olaf from the film "Frozen" has been launched. On the space station, there was also a plush Snoopy.

Snoopy has a lengthy association with NASA, dating back to the Apollo X astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Gene Cernan, who picked "Peanuts" characters as nicknames for the command and lunar modules, respectively.